Where is Nigeria’s HISTORY?

A question so many younger Nigerians are beginning to ask. A probe into why HISTORY is not taken seriously in Nigerian Schools.

Obiageli A. Iloakasia
5 min readFeb 19, 2022

Yesterday, I read on Twitter where someone had drawn what he considered the hierarchy of injustice by the Nigerian state. And it read in this order

  1. Burning of Fela’s family home
  2. Murder of MKO Abiola
  3. Murder of Saro-Wiwa
  4. Killing at the Lekki Toll gate

For so many reasons, I was eager to jump into the comment section and share my views too. Then, I thought first to read the views of other Nigerians who commented. Upon reading, it looked like it was becoming a small tribal war. Many Igbos in the comment section rebuked his rating and wondered why there was no mention of the Nigerian Civil War or what so many others call the “Biafra War”. This was no shock to me as I thought the same too. As a young Igbo woman, the knowledge of the Biafra genocide was one thing I wanted to know in detail, and to that, I have read and read and read as much as I can.

Amazing picture from Nigeria’s first independence Day Celebration in 1960. Souce: Legitng

So many other comments continued to flood the poster’s timeline. People highlighted more genocides that Nigeria has seen and no one ever spoke or speaks about. To my surprise, I saw deeper revelations about other attacks and genocides that have torn Nigeria even more.

The question becomes: Why is no one really talking about these genocides, and why are very few Nigerians aware of Nigeria’s history?

In the 2009/2010 academic session, HISTORY was removed from Nigeria’s primary and secondary school curriculum. From the news some official sources carried, students were hardly ever interested in HISTORY as a subject of study and very few students took it in school. About 7 years later, HISTORY was reintroduced after deliberations. It is interesting to note that as a child growing up in Nigeria, most of the HISTORY I ever heard were the ones I read from what the typical Nigerian calls “Current Affairs”, a small booklet often sold in Nigerian streets, containing just a little of what Nigeria ever gained. In this often-sold booklet, you would find questions that read more like primary school riddles of ‘the first woman to drive a car in Nigeria’ to ‘the first democratic president to rule Nigeria’.

In all the HISTORY texts read at primary and secondary school levels, one would never find a concrete HISTORY containing the Nigerian Civil War, the Tiv Riot of 1960, the Massacre of the Shiites in 2015, Operation Python Dance, Zakibiam Massacre, and many other stories, worth adding as historical accounts of what has formed the Nigeria we have today.

A picture from the Nigerian Civil War. Source: Daily Post Nigeria
A picture of 1967 Asaba Massacre. Source: The Glitters Online
A picture from Zakibiam Massacre. Source: Punch Newspapers

It has become only clearer that such historical accounts are intentionally hidden from the masses. In my Masters class, Dr. Chigbu always emphasizes how powerful written knowledge can be and what the controllers of written knowledge can do with the information they put out. Adding to this, I remember a statement I saved in my email draft last year after I came across it, I think from an article published by The Guardian, sometime in 2021. In the statement, Dr. Akin Alao said: “A country without a sense of history is a soulless country. It could safely be said that many of the challenges facing state and nation-building efforts in Nigeria are a result of the neglect of history. History of inter-group relations in Nigeria has confirmed the extent of interactions among Nigerian ethnic groups or nationalities long before the imposition of colonial rule. It would have been the duty of History as a subject in schools, to bring these truths to young Nigerians to influence their understanding of life and what roles they could play in cementing the relationship among groups.” These words by Dr. Akin Aloa are treasurable words that capture the need to teach the real History of the nation.

Most of the only history many Nigerians have known are histories read from online platforms that show a picture of what Nigeria is. If these platforms have become the most concrete sources where histories can be read, what then is the fate of true history, and who stands to question the epistemology of these histories? In 2020, following the End SARS Protest, I had begun to find great interest in the knowledge of the Nigerian state. I started to seek History Books where I could read deeper truths about Nigeria. Asides from some of the fiction texts (which have become one of the only true sources to gain knowledge of Nigeria’s history), I started to discover some great Historians Like Max Siollun. Through some of his works, I understood more clearly, how the Nigerian military has affected Nigeria’s socio-political bearing from the pre-colonial era to the present.

Since the End SARS Protest which resulted in the Lekki Tollgate Massacre or 20/10/2020 Massacre (Black Tuesday)— which has become a part of Nigeria’s history, many younger Nigerians have begun to ask very pertinent questions about the Nigerian state. I wake up to notifications on Twitter Spaces where young Nigerians are having fora on the problems of Nigeria.

Following many of the comments on the earlier mentioned tweet, more people showed a sense of shock as to many of the histories being shared in the comment section. Weblinks were also shared for further reading.

Taking out HISTORY from Nigeria’s curriculum meant taking out a subject that draws attention to the background of Nigeria and informs Nigerians about happenings so far. As seen on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History , “History” is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of events. Historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers. History is also an academic discipline that uses narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect.

Maybe no one asked the straightforward question on that platform. But now, I ask:

Where is Nigeria’s History?

What concrete stories from the past can we hold onto?

Now that younger Nigerians are interested, who will show us the way?

#NigeriaHistory #History #Stories #Nigeria

--

--